Q.) I have EVA6100 with four (4) disk enclosures that are fully populated; the customer is planning to add more 04 enclosures. The customer would like to rearrange the current disks layout by redistributing the disk among the new and old enclosures in vertical order. All the customer disks are in one group with 90% occupancy.
Does anyone know what is the best way to do this task without using the disk ungroup option?
A.)
1) Adding M5314 enclosures to a running EVA is supported. See the document titled ?HP StorageWorks EVA4x00/6×00/8×00 M5314 drive enclosure installation instructions?. I prefere to have the work done in non-prime time, and a planning tool ?EVA Upgrade Advisor? is available to help you assist in determination of non-prime times.
2) Add-on enclosures can be purchased without drives.
3) Moving around drives in a downed array to somehow come up with a ?good? RSS is not supported. Nor did it really achieve very much as the first time a drive failed or was added, the RSS layout changed anyway. Command View EVA no longer shows RSS in the customer interface. Chasing RSS around is not a good or productive idea.
4) Placement of disks in a ?vertical order? in the center of the enclosures was done for shipping purposes, and have no performance or reliability implications. There?s no operational reason to have the vertical order. Just spread the drives out over the enclosures as best you can. Note that vRAID-1 will automatically distribute the mirrored data over different enclosures if at all possible.
5) The only solution here is ungroup, removing the physical drive, inserting it in the new enclosure, and regroup. With 90% utilization this is going to be tedious and time-consuming. Strongly suggest the customer purchase additional disks to bring the utilization down to perhaps 60-70% then do the ungroup/remove/insert/regroup which will run faster due to more working space in the disk group.